The Trump White House, starved of information on the coronavirus by China in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan, didn’t realize it was a crisis that needed a new strategy until it spread to Italy, according to former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
“We didn’t know it was a crisis at the outset,” he said, revealing the inside fight to contain it.
In fact, he added, he didn’t even recall the first time he discussed the virus with the president. “I honestly don’t remember the first time that I talked with the president specifically about COVID. It would have been sometime in January, and it would have been a list of five or six things that we covered on a particular day,” he said in a Zoom conference hosted by Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service at the McCourt School of Public Policy.
“We knew something was happening in China, so we would have mentioned it to him early on, but there was no instant sort of, when a light bulb went on, and so now we talk about this,” he added in the online conference with other former White House chiefs of staff.
We just wrapped up our conversation with former WH Chiefs of Staff @Mack_McLarty, Andy Card, @DenisMcDonough, and Mick Mulvaney. Thanks to the panelists & all who tuned in!
If you missed the live conversation, catch the full event on our Facebook page: https://t.co/1WFu1Z0Je2 pic.twitter.com/dfdUNYQess
— Georgetown Politics (@GUPolitics) July 28, 2020
That light only went off, he said, when tests in Italy revealed that it could spread easily and asymptomatically.
“When we knew this was going to be different, it was some time around late February when it was in Italy, and we’d just started getting information about asymptomatic transmission,” said Mulvaney, candidly.
Up until that point, he recalled in the conference focused on crisis management, China, and other hot spots. When it was discovered that people with no symptoms could spread it, the strategy shifted to mitigation with social distancing and use of masks.
“At some point along the time when the Italian outbreak was in its very first days, [experts and doctors] came in and announced, ‘We think we have a problem with asymptomatic transmission.’ And that’s when it changed in our minds,” said Mulvaney.
That came long before the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic.
When they discovered it could be spread easily, he said that he called together a group that included Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield Jr., director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who delivered the shocking news to President Trump.
Mulvaney recalled telling the president, “This is going to have to change.” After that meeting, the president set up the coronavirus task force, which announced social distancing rules that prompted several states to shut down.
The former chief of staff and House member called it a “a slow, sort of simmering thing. We were operating with bad information about what the disease was, and we got that one piece of information that had to change the way we were dealing with the crisis. And that’s when we switched from containment to mitigation.”
Mulvaney said the lack of clear information about the virus and China’s role in keeping the world in the dark about it, will be part of the history of the government’s handling of it.
“Imperfect information,” he said, adding, “when they write the history of COVID crisis and our response to it, that will be a big part of it.”
Addressing the crisis topic put forth in the conference hosted by Mo Elleithee, the director of Georgetown Politics, Mulvaney said, “Not all crises are instantaneous.” And he added, “At that particular circumstance, we had it and didn’t know it for a variety of reasons.”
